Signature Links.

I know a lot of people out there including myself really want to know how much Google juice we are creating when we post with a backlink to our site in our signature.
This is information I’ve gathered over the months from loads of different forums and website. Hope you guys will get all the signature link ambiguity cleared up!

• Any page that has a link to your site and is indexed and not intentionally blocking the link is a backlink.
• Only nofollow links don’t help with SERPS all others are useful to varying degrees.
• Not all forums use nofollow.
• How the search engine spider know the link as a comment or forum signature? A link is just a link to the SE spiders.
• Search engines aren’t stupid. Indexing and organizing billions of pages everyday shows they have the ability to discern quite a bit about the pages they index.
• Google will not penalize you for having signature links. If it did I’d be banned 100 times over.
• Google doesn’t recognize a page as a forum. They only see it has a page. It has no more or less weight then any other page.
• If that page isn’t relevant to your site, the links won’t mean much. Plus with their being so many links on a forum page there will be little PR sent your way as well.
• Why wouldn’t I put my links in my signature? I don’t post here for the signature links, though. I post to help others and learn and using my signature is a great bonus. Especially when you are approaching 19,000 posts.
• Just keep in mind that although the quantity of backlinks may increase from forum signatures, the quality of backlinks you have won’t has forum sig links aren’t worth much to the search engines.
• Forum signature links have little SEO value. The pages are usually off-topic, PR is diluted to the point of virtual uselessness, and you can be sure having 15,000 links from the same domain is devalued. Signatures are best used to drive traffic to your websites and hopefully from there you can get backlinks from other webmasters because they like your content.
• Forum signatures and most directory links have extremely little SEO value. They’re just about as low quality as it gets.
• Forum signature links send almost no PR due to the low PR of the pages and countless links on them.
• Forum signature links definitely are not quality links.
• The links themselves don’t have a lot of SEO value is the point. I get plenty of traffic from my signature as well. And if your sitepoint sig provides most of your traffic you really need to start promoting your website!
• Forum signatures have very little value. But they do have some value. I wouldn’t go joining lots of forums for the sake of getting your links in your signatures. It’s not worth the effort. Participate in forums related to your topics and participate intelligently. Yes, you’ll get some links out of it, but the effect they have from that perspective will be minuscule compared to the traffic you get from members who appreciate your intelligent posts and want to see what you’ve got going on.
• For me forum sig links are a bonus for participating in a forum. It definitely isn’t the reason why I join a forum and post.
• Posting in forums for the sake of getting backlinks through signatures is a waste of time. The links have such little value that the ROI is just awful. But if you participate in forums then you should take advantage of your signature as you can get decent traffic and maybe even find others wanting to link to you because they like your site.

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